In communications environments, as well as other environments, it is important to quickly and accurately determine faulty components of the environments, in order to effect corrective action by repairing and/or replacing the faulty components.
Previously, in order to determine the faulty components of a communications environment, such as a switched network environment, errors were logged, events were generated from the logged errors and the events were reported. Previous techniques of reporting errors often failed to recognize cause and effect relationships between events across a network, and thus, failed to isolate to a theoretical minimal field replaceable unit (FRU) list. This, in turn, forced service personnel to determine the correct course of action using probabilities and other diagnostic techniques, thus extending system and/or resource outage.